The Substitute Bride (The Great Wedding Giveaway Series Book 7) (3 page)

He raised one brow. “Skippy’s their son?”

“Nope,” she said, smiling as she lifted the counter’s middle panel and moved through quickly. “Skippy’s their tarantula.”

––––––––

“G
et over here, Cowpoke!”  The old man at the piano swiveled on his bench and motioned toward Drake, who was sitting in the far corner of Long River’s dining room while he waited for his takeout. 
Drat
.  Drake had hoped to escape unnoticed.

“Come on!  A man can’t play a duet by himself!”

Smiling, Drake shook his head and waved off the suggestion.  “Not tonight, Fly.”

The old man scowled, drawing white brows down over piercing brown eyes.  Luckily, Drake knew the fury was all pretense.  At eighty-two, Bentley Larkspur had been called Fly so long even he, himself, would probably have to check his driver’s license to be sure.  He’d been one of Drake’s favorite people for the past eighteen years, ever since they’d met out on the Marietta riverbank, when Drake was only ten.

“Oh, the boy’s going to play hard to get!”  Fly stroked his short-cropped, white-bristled beard, which sent a ripple of laughter through the room.

Wednesday was Long River’s local rainbow trout night, so the restaurant was elbow-bumping crowded.  Fly had played piano bar at the grand opening last year, and he’d returned, off and on, ever since. 

“
Hard to get
....”  Fly grinned, his eyebrows bouncing evilly.  “Well, I guess we know how to fix
that
.”

The diners clapped, laughing and whistling playfully.  Though Long River wasn’t as upscale as, say, Beck’s Place out on the lake, for a family place it was fairly dignified.  Upholstered chairs, candlelight playing on yellow roses at each table, a bank of sparkling plate glass windows overlooking the river.

But it wasn’t in any danger of growing stuffy, not while Fly was here.

Gravely, Fly pantomimed tying a fly onto a fishing line.  The charade was so vivid Drake could almost see the arc, then the descent, as the line sailed toward the imaginary water. 

Fly opened his eyes wide, as if he’d felt the tug of a bite, and then, gleefully, he began reeling Drake in.

Drake groaned.  He knew this routine, too, and he understood it was pointless to resist.  He tilted his beer to his mouth and finished it off.  Then, shaking his head, he edged past the other tables and joined Fly at the piano in the center of the room.

“
Bully
,” he grumbled as he took the spot Fly had cleared by scooting over.  “I’m way too tired for this,”

And boy, was he.  Though it was only about six-thirty, it felt like midnight in his weary brain.  Damn long day.  All morning, wrangling over his dad’s will with the lawyers in Bozeman.  All afternoon, fending off his cousins—total strangers who had suddenly crawled out of the woodwork after twenty-five years to see if they might’ve inherited even an acre of the Three Horses Ranch.

And of course wasting the better part of his lunch hour getting the cold shoulder from Marly Akers. 

Some things never changed
.

“Oh, stop whining, Cowpoke, and play.”  Fly struck the first chord of “Heart and Soul,” their signature duet, and, though he groaned again, Drake had no choice but to join in on cue.

Theirs wasn’t like any rendition of “Heart and Soul” most people had ever heard.  Fly was a genius, and though Drake definitely wasn’t, anyone taught by Fly ended up sounding pretty good. 

Drake had to concentrate to keep up with the genius, and that meant he had to empty his mind of the day’s annoyances.  He didn’t even have mental space to think about the headache he’d come in with.

By the time they were finished, the headache was gone, the will was a trivial annoyance, the greedy cousins a joke.  Inexplicably, Drake felt ten years younger.  As the diners in the restaurant whistled and clapped, he turned to the old man and smiled.

“You’re welcome,” Fly said smugly, forestalling Drake’s thanks.  “I may have taught you only one song, but I taught you the right one.  Nobody can play eight straight minutes of “Heart and Soul” and hang on to a crappy mood.”

Rising, Drake laid his palm on the man’s shoulder, which was still remarkably solid, considering how sick he was.  His chest tightened, remembering these duets wouldn’t go on forever. 

“You’re right, boss,” he said. “As always.”

“Of course I am.” 

One of the guests called out a request, and as Fly’s fingers began tickling the keys he cocked his head toward the front door.

“And am I also right,” he murmured to Drake out of the corner of his mouth, “that the looker who just walked in is Angelina Akers’ little girl?”

Drake glanced over toward the entrance, where Janie Long was welcoming the newcomer. Angelina’s
little girl
?  Hardly.  Marly Akers was one gorgeous woman...with the emphasis on
woman
.

He watched as Marly smiled, obviously assuring Janie the wait for a table was no problem, and gestured toward the outdoors porch that overlooked the river. 

As Marly headed toward the door, she didn’t seem to notice Drake.  She didn’t look at the other diners she passed, either.  Instead, she concentrated on extracting an iPad from her large purse.

A working dinner, then...not a date with anyone.

Drake stood, squeezing a goodbye onto Fly’s shoulder, though the old man was already lost in his music.  And then, without asking himself why, Drake grabbed his suede jacket from his chair, and he moved toward the big bank of plate glass windows and doors, through which Marly had just disappeared.

He expected to find her in one of the chairs, studiously working on the iPad.  But when he reached the porch, she was leaning against the railing instead, staring out at the river, which twinkled peach and blue and gold in the last of the afternoon sunlight.  It moved rapidly, with little frothy caps, swollen with the mid-April snowmelt.

She wasn’t dressed quite warmly enough to be comfortable out here for long.  She wore a gold turtleneck sweater and wool slacks, same thing she’d had on at the Courier this morning.

Plenty warm for office hours on a spring day in Montana, but...

Outdoors, it wouldn’t hold up, not even today, when Marietta was enjoying some blissfully temperate weather.  Some years, the cold and snow clung to the city till May, so an easy April was a gift.

But even so...the breeze that blew her hair back from her ears still carried the memory of winter.  As he approached, she shivered slightly and tucked her fingers under her upper arms.

He joined her at the railing, resting his elbows on the rough wood to match her pose. 

“We really should stop meeting like this,” he said.  It was a dumb line, but he couldn’t think of anything clever.  She’d always had a way of shorting out his Smooth Operator circuits. 

She glanced over, clearly surprised.  And not in a good way.  Maybe she’d come to Long River, which was a couple of miles southeast of Marietta, because it was slightly removed from the downtown bustle.  Maybe she had wanted to be alone.

Now that he was up close, he could tell she still looked weary, as if even making small talk for ten minutes might be too much for her. 

He felt a brief twinge of guilt, but he ignored it.  He knew first-hand that sometimes when you most hated the world and pined to be left alone, what you really needed was someone who could make you laugh.  Someone who could lift you out of the quicksand of your own thoughts.

“Hello, Drake,” she said hollowly, as if her voice were on automatic pilot.  “I—I’m just waiting for a table.  I thought I’d enjoy the water, but it’s cold, so maybe I should go back inside.”

But he didn’t want her to do that.  He hadn’t expected to get another chance to talk to her so soon, and he refused to let it slip away.  Without a word, he draped his jacket over her shoulders—casually, as if it were no big deal. 

“No point missing this great view.”  He was meticulous about not letting his hands linger, so he wouldn’t spook her.  He realized with an inward smile that he was treating her much as he might treat a skittish colt.

Not too much eye contact, either, until trust was built.  He turned back toward the river and let his gaze rest easily on the middle distance.  It
was
a great view.  Behind the pines, above the ring of mountaintops, the sky was shifting colors like a kaleidoscope, getting ready to put on the sunset show.

“I’m actually impressed to run into you here,” he said lightly.  “Twenty-four hours back in town, and you’ve already discovered one of our best new restaurants?  Guess you really are a crack journalist.”

She chuckled, and he risked a brief glance at her.  When their eyes met, he smiled, but kept it low-key.  He didn’t turn on full wattage, mostly because she still seemed jittery—but also because he remembered that she hadn’t ever been a fan of white teeth and dimples, not even in high school.

Frankly, her immunity to what he’d considered his irresistible charm had mystified him, back then.  He’d been an arrogant bastard, and he’d known those dimples were his ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ card. 

But not with Marly.  Her indifference had acted on his adolescent hormones the way a red flag acts on a bull.  For a few months, he’d been consumed by an intense need to scale the blank wall of her indifference, and to conquer whatever lay behind.  He’d briefly lost any desire to romp around in the free-admission, open-gated pastures offered by the other girls.

Briefly
.  He was only eighteen, after all.

“Is Long River the best?” She shrugged.  “I didn’t know.  Joseph Butterworth recommended it.”

Of course he had
.  Joseph Butterworth had the best-looking paralegals in Montana, and he never turned down a case from a sexy woman, even if she was dead guilty.  The man had probably manufactured his Applebaum tarantula crisis merely to ensure he met the pretty new reporter.

“I’m glad to see Erica didn’t shoot you,” Drake said, now that she’d brought up Butterworth. “And if she’d shot Joseph or Otis, I’m sure I would have heard.  Did you at least get a decent story?”

“I did.”  Marly smiled, and it instantly changed her.  Her face had seemed listless, in spite of the sunset painting her cheeks.  But this, her first genuine smile, brought her to life.  “I won’t write the gun story, of course.  That didn’t come to anything.  But Erica, herself...she’ll make a great profile.” 

“Yeah?”  He tilted his head curiously.  “Are we talking about the same Erica Applebaum?  The one who looks like Churchill?”

She chuckled.  “She does, a little, doesn’t she?  Still...she loves that spider like a baby.  You should have seen her.  She had a rifle under one arm, and Skippy under the other, lying on his back in his jelly jar.  Apparently he hasn’t eaten in weeks.  Otis says he’s just molting, but Erica insists it’s the stress of the divorce.”

She laughed, and Drake instinctively turned toward the sound, letting it wash over him.  Marly Akers had always had a nice laugh. Mostly, she’d edited his columns with a scowl on her face, but once in a rare moon he’d written something so ridiculous she’d laughed in spite of herself.  Pretty soon, he’d found himself tailoring his columns to try to earn the next laugh.

“You look tired,” he said, returning his gaze to the water, just in case the comment was too personal.  “Rough day?”

Their shoulders were close enough that he could almost feel her shrug. 

“I’ve been walking around Marietta this afternoon,” she said, which was almost an answer, but not quite.  “I wanted to reacquaint myself.  My last stop was the high school.  I popped in to see Mrs. Florence.”

“Oh, lord.”  He groaned instinctively.  Mrs. Florence was the English teacher who’d acted as advisor to the Grizzly Growl.  She’d been fond of Drake, and allowed him a ridiculous amount of leeway on his column, but she’d been ruthless on his essays.  He’d almost lost a college scholarship because she’d flat refused to give him an A in her class, dimples or no dimples.

“I bet she was glad to see you.”  He cocked a grin her way.  “
Teacher’s pet
.”

“Yeah, well.”  She rolled her eyes.  “
Slacker
.”

It was an old, familiar rhythm, insulting each other without really meaning it.  Back then, it had been the only way he could think of to inject familiarity into their relationship, the only bridge across their great social and academic divide.

And apparently it was the only way he could think of tonight, too.

“Actually, Mrs. Florence recommended this restaurant, too,” she said.  “She even gave me a ride here on her way home.  She still drives that same old Buick, can you believe it?”

“Wait.” He didn’t care about how Mrs. Florence got around.  “You don’t have a car?”

“Not yet. My rental will be ready in the morning.”

“How will you get home tonight, then?”

“I’ll call a cab, I guess.” 

She didn’t seem to think the issue was important.  Maybe in San Francisco it wouldn’t have been.  Around here, however, taxis didn’t come when they were called, like lapdogs.  They came when the planets aligned, like unicorns.

But
Drake
could give her a ride home...

He shook his head, internally.  He had to stop thinking like a teenager, instinctively zeroing in on how to turn her lack of wheels to his advantage. 

Instead, he returned to discussing her job, which seemed to be her most comfortable topic. 

“So...if you’re really excited about profiling trigger-happy Erica Applebaum, I have to assume your other Courier assignments must look pretty bleak.”

She hesitated a minute, and in the pause the tinkling of Fly’s piano drifted toward them.  Then she sighed.

“Not bleak, exactly.  Just...”  She still had her hand on his jacket’s lapel, but instead of removing it she pulled it farther over her chest.  “I don’t know.  Just not my kind of stories.  Apparently I’ve been tapped to cover the Great Wedding Giveaway.  Interviewing the semi-finalists, talking up the prizes, stuff like that.  Sounds more like public relations work than journalism.”

He held back his instinctive grunt of surprise.  But
come on
.  The Great Wedding Giveaway?  It was a cute idea, commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of Marietta’s 1914 bridal giveaway by offering another free wedding package.  He knew lots of women who had entered.